They both gave excellent talks which were recorded on Imperial’s ‘Panopto’ recording system. We hope to make these available for viewing/download as soon as possible. The recordings are now publicly available! CB’s talk is available to stream here & download here, JMcA’s talk is available to stream here & download here.

We had lots of free swag to give away to attendees, including PLOS t-shirts, notebooks, USB sticks and ‘How Open Is It?‘ guides, as well as SPARC and OA Button stickers & badges – they seemed to go down well. I kept some swag back for the next event too, so if you didn’t get what you wanted this time, there will be more next time!

The speakers were kind enough to publicly post their slide-decks before their talks so you can alternatively catch-up with their content on Slideshare.

I’ll refrain from naming names for the sake of privacy but what I most enjoyed about the event was the diversity of attendees. We had people who were ‘curious’ about Open Access and wanted to know more. We had a new PhD student, we had midway PhD students, librarians, open access publishers, and more… I believe one attendee might even have travelled back to Brighton after the event! In terms of affiliations, we had attendees from Jisc, The Natural History Museum London, Imperial College (two different campuses represented!), UCL, The National Institute for Medical Research (MRC), and AllTrials.

I was also mightily impressed that nearly all the attendees, including both speakers happily joined us in the student union (Eastside) afterwards for discussions & networking over drinks – a real sense of community here I think.

Can we do better next time? Sure we can, we must! Attendance was lower than I had hoped for but several people kindly messaged me afterwards to let me know they wanted to be there but couldn’t. I’ve no doubt that with warmer weather we’ll be able to double our attendance.

The next ORL meetup will be in mid or late March at UCL, further details TBC.

I’m actively in the process of trying to grow the organising/steering committee for ORL. At the moment it’s just myself, Liz I-S and Jon Tennant. If you’re passionate about open research, open access, open data, reproducible research, citizen science, diversity in research, open peer-review etc… then get in contact with me: ross.mounce@gmail.com

I would love to have an OC that more broadly represents the variety of the open research community in London :)